ABC's Modern Family has been steadily growing on me

The family: That's patriarch Jay (Ed O'Neill) at left with his new wife Gloria (Sofia Vergara) and stepson Manny (Rico Rodriguez); in the middle, Jay's daughter Claire (Julie Bowen) with her husband Phil (Ty Burrell) and (right to left) Haley (Sarah Hyland), Alex (Ariel Winter), and Luke (Nolan Gould); and at right, Jay's son Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, holding baby Lily) and partner Cameron (Eric Stonestreet).

by Ken

Genuine originality isn't something we often have to worry about in TV, especially of the network variety, and so I sometimes tend to forget my personal cautionary tale: Soap, Susan Harris's very dark and very hilarious soaplike saga of the Tate (rich) and Campbell (not rich) families. I remember watching the first episode and not only not finding anything funny but being simply appalled by the atrocious taste of it all. In particular, there was the Tates' servant Benson (the great Robert Guillaume) joking about putting sugar in the coffee of Mr. Tate (the wonderful Robert Mandan), a diabetic. This, I remember thinking, is supposed to be humorous, feeding sugar to a diabetic?

The thing is, you had to know the characters. Once you got to know Chester Tate, the idea of slipping him sugar came to seem a lot less outlandish, and once you came to understand the weird relationship between Benson and the various Tates, you kind of wondered why he didn't. But I missed all of that the first time around, and it wasn't till years later, when the show was in syndication, that I came to appreciate its brilliance. The people who made the show had created their own comic universe, and they had it up and running from that first episode. They had the audacity to expect an audience to hunker down and get what they were up to. Luckily, it happened.

Of course, a good part of the Soap audience probably did think feeding sugar to a diabetic was hilarious. That's the thing about network TV. For a show to succeed big-time, it helps for it to work on multiple levels, for multiple audiences.

Now I'm not saying that Modern Family -- created and produced by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, who have some mighty impressive TV credits -- is on the level of Soap, at least not yet. But I am saying that I've come around a good way since I wrote about it previously. Consider this clip. With Mitchell, Jay's uptight lawyer son, having been unable to tell the rest of his family anything more than that he and his life partner of five years, Cameron (Eric Stonestreet), have been thinking of adopting a baby, now that they have actually flown to Vietnam and returned with Lily, the last possible moment for some sort of announcement seems to have been reached, and Cam has duly summoned everyone.



If you don't know and on some level understand the characters, my guess is that this clip is somewhere between pointless and appalling, a collection of crude clichés and tired jokes. (If you don't know the characters and you love this clip, I think we probably don't have much to talk about.) That's pretty much where I was when I wrote originally about Modern Family, dealing with it in a clump with two other ABC Wednesday-night sitcoms, The Middle, which I liked (and like) a lot, and Cougar Town, which I liked better than the people who make the show seem to think I should, given the nasty leer with which it's sent out to us.

Here's what I wrote before about Modern Family:

Speaking of people not grasping basic truths, you might think that the whole point of Modern Family is to show us an entire set of characters who go beyond incomplete self-knowledge and knowledge about the people close to them to complete lack of such knowledge. At any rate, you might think that was the point if you could think of any way that might give the show a point. Again I have to wonder how much network meddling got in the way of a program concept that might have been developed into something genuinely interesting and funny.

Maybe the idea is that somehow the show can rise above the massive pile-on of character clichés and cartoonish stereotypes and become . . . well, I have no idea what it might become. All that said, though, I notice that I haven't reprogrammed the DVR to stop recording new episodes. Is it possible that there really is something there?

I think the most important thing I wrote there is that I had not stopped recording new episodes, and at this point I'm getting a much clearer sense, not of "what it might become," but of what it is. For example, in the clip we've already seen, once you do know the characters, the scene opens up.

Mitchell, for example, tends to assume that everything he gets from his family has to do with his being gay, and is meant to insult him. In fact, a great deal has to do with his massive insecurities and overly intellectualized way of looking at the world, and of course the whole complex of his relationships with his seemingly perfect sister Claire and their father -- and mother. As I mentioned previously, we've actually met Dede, in the person of Shelley Long, and now the casting is coming to seem to me fairly brilliant.



There was also a wonderful guest appearance by Benjamin Bratt as Gloria's ex-husband, Manny's mostly absent father. Despite Gloria's warnings about her ex's enormous charm, a resentful Jay is wholly seduced by Javier -- right up to the point where, like everyone else in the guy's life, he lets him down.

One thing that put me off is that, at least for me, none of these characters is easy to like, or even accept, except perhaps Claire. (How is it possible to dislike the lustrous Julie Bowen?) The flamboyant Cam is perhaps the hardest. But there's real human fullness as well as affection in the character, who really does represent a brave and sensible mate choice for Mitchell. Consider this scene:



Some background is needed here. Cam has mentioned to Mitchell that while in town he ran into Mitch's father with four of his cronies, and Jay introduced him as "a friend of my son." To Cam it's just something worth taking note of, but to Mitchell it's such a mortal insult that he drives into town and confronts his father.

CAMERON [indicating flowers]: Mitchell, how do these look?
MITCHELL: Like they're dying.
CAMERON: I know, right? I said something to the florist, and he said, "Oh, don't worry about it, they're going to come back." They're not coming back! They've crossed to the other side!
MITCHELL: You are a funny man.
CAMERON: Why?
MITCHELL: Because you're completely bothered by the flowers, but when my father introduces you as "a friend of my son," it doesn't faze you in the least.
CAMERON: Because the florist played me for a fool. Your dad didn't mean any harm. He's just being who he is.

When Mitchell asks whether his father would refer to his sister's husband Phil as "a friend of Claire's," Cam says, "I've heard him call Phil a lot worse."

We could all call Phil all sorts of names, but let's just settle for "boob." It's not that he's unintelligent, but that his brain is all twisted up in and consumed by delusions of hipness and special insights he simply doesn't have. Watch and wince. (Haley, by the way, is 15.)



Haley causes Claire all sorts of anxiety because she sees herself at that age, and remembers how that worked out. She has her own anxieties and terrors, not least of all things mechanical, a trait that, interestingly, she shares with her brother -- as Cam points out to Mitchell. When Claire is unable to figure out how to use the remote for the new home theater system Phil has installed, he's challenged to teach Haley how to use it in 20 minutes. And what's in it for Haley? "This is for all those times Mom told you she was right and you knew she was wrong." Needless to say, Haley becomes a remote-conrol whiz. Naturally, though, as with most everything else on Modern Family, this leads to more conflict and confusion.

I think it was the most recent episode of Modern Family that opened with husband and wife Phil and Claire fielding the question -- to the imaginary cameras apparently filming an imaginary documentary about this extended "modern family" -- as to whether people can change, and Phil announcing his unshakable belief that they can, which Claire points out kind of argues the opposite.

These characters do change. Take this little father-son exchange, after Mitchell has tricked Jay into thinking that one of his old cronies -- you know, the guys to whom Cam was introduced as "a friend of my son" -- is gay.

MITCHELL: I'm proud of you, Dad. You're growing.
JAY: Just, just stop it, please. Don't you see how hard this is for me? See, I used to be just like one of those guys. Now look at me. I got a house looks like Little Colombia, I got a gay son and a Chinese granddaughter.
MITCHELL: Vietnamese.
JAY [muttering]: Only you would know the difference.
MITCHELL: Don't worry, Dad, you're not growing too much.

By the end of the show, the case is being made that people can perhaps change, but only about 15 percent -- but that "Sometimes that's just enough."

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